Frances Bellenden Clarke was born in Ireland in 1854. In 1871 she married a widowed army surgeon, Chambers McFall, with whom she had one son. They travelled extensively in the Far East. As a New Woman novelist, she became a leading figure in late nineteenth-century feminism of social and moral purity. Her fiction explores the possibilities of female emancipation in the public sphere of education and career. At the same time she endorsed marriage and motherhood of the highest standard exacted by the sexually selective woman of the future. Her belief in female evolutionary superiority was often expressed in a moral eugenics toward the regeneration of the race and nation.
Having failed to find a publisher for her first novel Ideala (1888) she printed it herself, seven years after its
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Citation: Randolph, Lyssa. "Sarah Grand". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 October 2000 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1836, accessed 22 November 2024.]
